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What is needed is training for those in these neighborhoods on how to respect the law. Problem is lawlessness doesn't respect the law. Also who is going to raise these young men? Grown fathers and mothers, the nuclear family. Oh wait, BLM is against that. Michael Jackson had a song years ago - man in the mirror. There is where to start to make this problem improve.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jarius
AmenQuote:
Originally Posted by MarcoRubio
Ignorant non independent thinking partisan people with blank factless accusations are the disease.....AmenQuote:
Originally Posted by MarcoRubio
Agreed. Folks need to learn to respect the law. We have had at least two players arrested this year (Harris and Heath). Both were in the wrong and both should be embarrassed about it. And the other players should be in their face telling them to straighten up or get the hell out. But that doesn't happen.Quote:
Originally Posted by R2Dawg
This is a little long but a good read by a black sports reporter - Jason Whitlock. Sorry for not providing a link to this story.
https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/wp-co...-3-150x150.jpg
Jason Whitlock is a sports columnist for Outkick.com, a TV and radio host, and a podcaster. A graduate of Ball State University, where he was a football letterman, he worked as a sportswriter at The Kansas City Star from 1994 to 2010. He has also worked for ESPN, AOL Sports, and Fox Sports. In 2007, he became the first sportswriter to win the Scripps Howard National Journalism Award for Commentary. He founded ESPN’s “The Undefeated” website and helped create and host “Speak for Yourself” on FOX Sports 1.
Nearly 30 years ago, in a 1993 Nike commercial, professional basketball legend Charles Barkley fired the first shot at the “role model” concept popularized by Columbia University sociologist Robert K. Merton in the aftermath of the 1960s counterculture movement. “I am not a role model,” Barkley proclaimed in the half-minute spot. “I’m not paid to be a role model. I’m paid to wreak havoc on the basketball court. Parents should be role models. Just because I dunk a basketball doesn’t mean I should raise your kids.”
Barkley’s words landed with a force every bit the equal of former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s National Anthem knee 23 years later. Former Vice President Dan Quayle defended Barkley, while Barkley’s fellow NBA superstar Karl Malone criticized him in Sports Illustrated. Leading news magazines, including Time and Newsweek, published articles exploring the controversy. Newspaper columnists from coast to coast—on and off the sports pages—also weighed in. The topic still sparks debate today.
Of the many phrases and concepts Merton coined—including “self-fulfilling prophecy” and “unintended consequences”—“role model” has had the most impact. On the surface, the argument that young people tend to model their behavior after high-profile, successful adults is harmless. However, in retrospect, the elevation of athletes and other celebrities as primary figures in the formation of behavioral norms for young people helped create the conditions that are powering the destructive Black Lives Matter movement today.
Merton’s role model concept undercuts the importance of parents and nuclear families. That was the point of Barkley’s criticism. Feminists and other progressive critics of America’s “patriarchal” society—including the Black Lives Matter movement, whose Marxist-influenced statement of purpose opposes “the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure”—have used Merton’s concept to great effect. Muhammad Ali, Pete Rose, Farrah Fawcett, Barbara Streisand, Mick Jagger, Marvin Gaye, and Burt Reynolds infringed on territory primarily reserved for mom, dad, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and teachers.
Technology has helped advance the process, diminishing the influence of traditional authority figures and strengthening the reach of celebrities. Kids shut their bedroom doors, turn on their televisions, laptops, and game consoles, plug in earbuds, open social media apps, and disappear into a world far removed from mom and dad. With a mere push of a button they tune out the worldview of their families and tune in the worldview of athlete LeBron James, actress Lena Dunham, rapper Snoop Dogg, social media race-baiter Shaun King, and others like them.
On top of all this, we now see America’s enemies, particularly China, using these modern role models to promote racial division and destabilize our country—with those on the political Left as their accomplices. Today, they have coalesced around the Black Lives Matter movement to push America toward a level of racial dysfunction and animus not experienced since the Civil War.
It’s fitting that Charles Barkley fired the first shot against this trend, because American sports have become the Gettysburg of what some have called our “cold civil war.” And if China and the Left complete their radicalization of sports, our nation may never recover.
Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to inspire. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youth in a language they understand. Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers. It laughs in the face of all types of discrimination.
Nelson Mandela, the South African freedom fighter-turned-statesman, spoke those words in an effort to heal the country he came to lead after spending a quarter century incarcerated for opposing apartheid. Mandela embraced sports’ power to bridge racial divides, looking on athletic competition as a kind of antibiotic for racial animus and discrimination. South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup and Mandela’s presentation of the Webb Ellis Cup to team captain Francois Pienaar stand as an iconic symbol of unity in post-apartheid South Africa. Clint Eastwood directed a movie, Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon, that memorialized the importance of the moment. It bears re-watching today.
Since sprinter Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and boxer Joe Louis scored a first-round knockout over German heavyweight Max Schmeling in 1938, sports have served as a powerful racial unifier in America as well. The victories earned by Owens and Louis punctured Hitler’s Aryan superiority myth, unified black and white Americans in celebration, and established Owens and Louis as this country’s first black national heroes.
Owens and Louis laid the foundation for Brooklyn Dodgers General Manager Branch Rickey’s partnership with Jackie Robinson to integrate our national pastime, Major League Baseball, a decade later. Robinson’s successful integration of baseball, in turn, inspired Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s.
Indeed, Barack Obama, America’s first black president—the world’s first black leader of a predominantly white country—credited Robinson’s career for his own political rise. “There’s a direct line between Jackie Robinson and me standing here,” Obama said in January 2017, while hosting the world champion Chicago Cubs at the White House. He continued:
There’s a direct line between people loving Ernie Banks, and then the city being able to come together and work together in one spirit. . . . Sometimes it’s just a matter of us being able to escape and relax from the difficulties of our days, but sometimes it also speaks to something better in us. And when you see this group of folks of different shades and different backgrounds, and coming from different communities and neighborhoods all across the country, and then playing as one team and playing the right way, and celebrating each other and being joyous in that, that tells us a little something about what America is and what America can be.
Yes, America is a shining example of sports’ transformative power. The games we play, the games at the center of our social behavior, combine with our founding principles to enhance the American experience. America’s enemies know this, which is why the culture war has moved to our arenas and stadiums. Sports are now in the same crosshairs as our Founding Fathers, under attack for past racial sins and unappreciated for their vital role in cultivating racial unity. Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, but by writing the Declaration of Independence he made the emancipation of slaves inevitable. American sports were once segregated, but no American industry can match sports’ empowerment of black men.
The black-player-dominated National Football League is the most powerful force in American popular culture. It provides the number one television show on five different networks—CBS, FOX, NBC, ESPN, and the NFL Network. In this era of have-it-your-way TV, where consumers record and watch shows when they want while fast-forwarding through advertisements, only live sporting events can be consistently counted on to deliver audiences that sit through commercials.
But while American sports have never been more influential, they’ve also never been more vulnerable to foreign influence. Their partnership with global brands and their desire to build global audiences have given foreign countries a pathway to manipulate American sports and culture.
Look at how China, with its 1.4 billion consumers, rules the National Basketball Association and its de facto parent company, Nike, the same way it rules Hollywood. Access to China’s consumers and Asia’s cheap labor (even sometimes slave labor) is the key to Nike’s economic growth. The Portland-based shoe and apparel manufacturer generates $40 billion a year in revenue. Its global reach, agenda, and revenue streams dictate the strategy of the $8-billion-a-year NBA. Many are unaware that Nike, and not the NBA, controls basketball. One could make a fair argument that the NBA is nothing more than the in-house marketing department of Nike.
Both Nike and the NBA kowtow to China, which explains their silence on the horrific human rights abuses inside China and the suppression of Hong Kong freedom fighters by China’s communist government. More important, Nike and the NBA’s China agenda helps explain why Nike pitchmen LeBron James and Colin Kaepernick enthusiastically smear the United States as inherently racist and evil. From Joseph Stalin to Fidel Castro to our own time, the communists’ favorite propaganda tactic has been to paint the West, and the U.S. in particular, as racist.
The militant social justice messaging of James and Kaepernick serves the interests of not only the Chinese Communist Party and globalist corporations like Nike, but also our political Left. Kaepernick’s National Anthem defiance in 2016 gave the Left an opportunity to politicize football, America’s new national pastime, and force it into the kind of “progressive” posturing already commonplace in the NBA and Hollywood. Arrogance, lack of foresight, and the advice of an inner circle that included former Clinton administration press secretary Joe Lockhart as the NFL’s vice president of communications, explain commissioner Roger Goodell’s laissez-faire approach to Kaepernick’s protest. Underestimating the determination of the Left and the power of social media to intimidate corporate America, Goodell and the NFL’s TV partners wrongly thought that the Kaepernick controversy would fade over time.
Instead, four years after Kaepernick first knelt, the Leftist mob has forced the National Football League, Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association to take their own knees and pay homage to the dishonest Black Lives Matter narrative on police brutality. The NFL plans to paint social justice messages across its end zones this season and to allow players to wear helmet decals with the names of alleged police victims. The San Francisco 49ers fly a BLM flag next to an American flag at Levi’s Stadium. MLB opened its COVID-shortened season with “BLM” carved into pitcher’s mounds, and the Boston Red Sox put up a 254-foot BLM billboard outside Fenway Park. NHL players are now regularly kneeling during the National Anthem. The NBA’s basketball bubble at Disney World is a virtual shrine to BLM: “Black Lives Matter” is painted on the court, players wear social justice messages on the back of their jerseys, and it’s major news when a player stands during the National Anthem.
The entire American sports world—a culture that traditionally celebrates victors, meritocracy, colorblindness, and patriotism—has suddenly immersed itself in black victimization and left-wing radicalism. This immersion threatens to do permanent damage to American culture as a whole. It has certainly undermined national pride. A country that no longer believes in its founding ideals cannot prosper and survive.
If our sports stadiums and arenas have become the Gettysburg of the culture war, Lebron James and Colin Kaepernick are playing the roles of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, fighting to divide the nation even further than it is. The mainstream media is only half right in casting them as modern-day equivalents of Muhammad Ali. Ali’s religious sect, the Nation of Islam, was certainly divisive: it championed black secession. But unlike the BLM movement, it also rejected victimhood. Its founder Elijah Muhammad and its spokesman Malcolm X promoted bootstrap self-reliance and were disdainful of liberal politics. “The worst enemy that the Negro [has],” said Malcolm X,
is this white man that runs around here drooling at the mouth professing to love Negros and calling himself a liberal. It is following these white liberals that has perpetuated problems that Negros have. If the Negro wasn’t taken, tricked or deceived by the white liberal, then Negros would get together and solve our own problems. I only cite these things to show you that in America, the history of the white liberal has been nothing but a series of trickery designed to make Negros think that the white liberal was going to solve our problems.
Pro-BLM athletes today have moved beyond the idea of a role model that was debated in 1993—the idea of modeling behavior to be imitated, such as self-reliance, hard work, responsibility, and good parenthood. Through the power of social media, to which they are addicted, these modern role models exert influence by promoting commercial products and political causes. In the case of NBA athletes like Lebron James, this means turning their backs not only on the oppressed people of China and Hong Kong, but also on the poor and underprivileged in America among whom so many of these wealthy athletes grew up, and who they now condemn to victimhood and dependency with their political activism.
Charles Barkley was right 30 years ago. Parents, not athletes, should be role models. Today the situation is even worse, with sports further dividing an already dangerously divided nation, rather than providing the unifying and even healing force Nelson Mandela described. Predictably, there are now calls to boycott sports, and it seems inevitable that the TV ratings of the pro sports leagues will decline. This is unlikely to matter, however, to the suddenly-woke billionaire team owners and their handpicked commissioners.
As fans, we can only hope and pray that these feckless leaders will reconsider their embrace of the BLM cult—a necessary first step to returning American sports to what it has been in the past: a force for unity and a model of a diverse and colorblind meritocracy.
You just can't see the bigger issue, can you? Instead, as usual, it's all about you and what you want.Quote:
Originally Posted by Todd4State
This is terrifying.Quote:
Originally Posted by Coldhardtruth
The last thing I want are citizens playing batman.
I put trust in our cops and other professionals to handle that.
This entire debate is tough and people all have their opinions. But I can't support the idea of a teenager voluntarily providing armed security to protect property that isnt theirs.
Well the cops aren’t stopping the carnage and there have been democratic AGs saying they aren’t going to prosecute protestors and democratic mayors refusing federal help so private citizens have to step up if they don’t want the town burned to the ground.Quote:
Originally Posted by hp22
Why don't you tell me instead of using the same bullshit sound bite from Twitter that doesn't really say anything other than I hurt your feelings?Quote:
Originally Posted by Joebob
It looks like the Big-10 commish is going political with his decision and is aiming to get student athletes to vote to oust Trump.
https://sports.yahoo.com/can-the-big...180131201.html
Amazing how fast partisan politics infected nearly everything, huh?Quote:
Originally Posted by Interpolation_Dawg_EX
At least they're being honest now.Quote:
Originally Posted by Interpolation_Dawg_EX
Anyone care to share their thoughts on why this guy didn't get 7 rounds pumped into his back when he returned to his truck? Please don't miss the part where he tells the cop that he as going to ****ing kill him!Quote:
Originally Posted by Thick
Great patience the officer showed. I appreciate all they do to keep us safe!
I don't know. It didn't really show the entire incident. It cut off in the middle. He should have been arrested. But I need to know how the entire incident played out to give you an answer. For all we know the cop called back up and the guy was taken in. Why was he pulled over?Quote:
Originally Posted by Gutter Cobreh
Until further evidence is provided this is like showing me a baseball player and an umpire arguing for a minute and half without showing me why they were arguing or the end result and then asking me "why wasn't this player ejected from the game?"
Regardless this shows part of the problem- video that is intentionally misleading.
Every situation is different. No two cops, people, or situations are the same. Like Todd said what's the context here? Going to need more information but to assume across the board that since Blake was shot 7 times in the back then everyone should be shot seven times in the back is a bad argument. Anyone can find "evidence" to back up whatever claim they want. I'll say this though that not once in my life have I been a victim of police brutality. I've been pulled over many times and never have escaped a ticket even though I thought I should've been let off with a warning several of those times. My wife has been pulled over more times than I have and has never gotten a ticket (she's not white either). I feel that's a little unfair but not once did I argue (I broke the law anyway) or become non-compliant. I accepted the ticket and moved on with my life. As much as people want to harp on cops about their training the same people need to teach others to obey the law and that starts at home. I bet 99/100 those that have problems with compliance had the same issue at home and were never dealt with.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gutter Cobreh
And just like that, Biden videos popping up in Big10 country saying orange man canceled their season.Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt3467
It's you who can't see or refuse to see the real issue.Quote:
Originally Posted by Joebob
Have you seen the video of Daniel Shaver(white guy) getting shot in a hotel? Point is you have to look at each situation individually. It isn't the same police officer killing these people or not. You're acting like because in this one instance the police didn't shoot that it is an indictment on every officer of being racist when a black man is killed half way across the country in another precinct.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gutter Cobreh
We can pick and choose videos all day and we would both be able to find claims to back each point of view.
What do you make of the stats though? 13% of the population committing some 50+% of all violent crime. 15 unarmed black men killed, some justified, some not. We have over 800 thousand law enforcement officers in this country. If cops were out hunting people don't you think the numbers would bare that? One miscalculation is too many, I understand that. Is there still plenty of room for improvement, absolutely. Do I have an issue with our football players peacefully protesting? No, not in the least bit. I just wish some people would actually look at the numbers and start to have a discussion centered around the numbers and where/how we can improve. Not the "our system is broken and we need a whole new system".
I think there is a much better argument to be made for inequality once cases hit the court systems. Cops for the most part do their job pretty well for what is being asked of them. It is the Lawyers, DAs etc. that IMO are doing the most harm. Non violent crime jail sentences etc. are a huge drain on tax payer dollars. I do believe a lot of this is more in line with wealth inequality as poor white defendants often find themselves in the same situations while wealthy people tend to find ways out of non violent offenses without a criminal record.
And you know the irony of that is Biden co signed a bill in 94 "the tough on crime" bill and has always up until the last two or three years been in favor of tougher punishment. Kamala Harris denied plenty of innocent men in jail a chance at having new DNA testing done that could have cleared them of any wrong doing when she was a DA. So to act as though Biden and Harris will be all for prison reform is a joke. If/when they get elected they are going to go right back to doing what they did. It is all lip service.
I can't rep this enough! You just nailed it in a nutshell. Thank you.Quote:
Originally Posted by BB30
You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to BB30 again.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BB30
Rep Given!!!